The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).

…did you know that the first recorded pioneer of man-powered flight in the British Isles was an Anglo-Saxon monk from Malmesbury Abbey called Eilmer (or in Old English, Æthelmaer) who lived between about 980 and 1070?

Eilmer’s life is recounted in the Deeds of the Kings of England [pictured here] by William of Malmesbury; indeed, William may have met him when Eilmer was an old man. According to William, many years earlier Eilmer had attached wings to his hands and his feet and jumped from a tower, travelling at least a ‘stadium’ (possibly 200 metres or 600 feet), before being caught by turbulence and breaking both his legs. Eilmer later claimed his error was not fitting a tail to himself, as well as wings. For comparison, the Wright Brothers’ first flight covered about 120 feet.

Eilmer was probably born in the 980s and died after 1066, so his flight probably took place in the 1000s or 1010s. We can guess Eilmer’s lifespan because William of Malmesbury claimed Eilmer had seen Halley’s Comet twice, in 1066 and presumably in 989….

He was a man of good learning for those times, of mature age, and in his early youth had hazarded an attempt of singular temerity. He had by some contrivance fastened wings to his hands and feet, in order that, looking upon the fable as true, he might fly like Daedalus, and collecting the air on the summit of a tower, had flown for more than the distance of a furlong; but, agitated by the violence of the wind and the current of air, as well as by the consciousness of his rash attempt, he fell and broke his legs, and was lame ever after. He used to relate as the cause of his failure, his forgetting to provide himself a tail.

NEXT POST: Why do they fear British money is made of meat?

“If journalists stopped believing they had to publish a story or post a blog the minute a new study came out…”

You will never hear about most of the flood of research that’s done, worldwide. Partly, that’s because there is so very, very much of it. But partly, it’s because the custom of “embargoing” a small number of studies ends up focusing most press attention — and so most public attention — on a teeny tiny, itsy bitsy fraction of what’s out there.

… But it’s clear that a lot of the power of embargoes would go away if journalists stopped believing they had to publish a story or post a blog the minute a new study came out. Sure, I get the value of a news peg. I used to run a wire service, Reuters Health, that covers health. But it warps the public’s understanding of how science works.

One new study can’t overturn the consensus in the field. And in many cases, the newest study is just the one most likely to be disproven in the future. Readers can often learn more from the history of a scientific question than they can from just the latest stab at answering that question.

But because reporters feel the need to make every finding sound important, embargoes are responsible in some large part, for example, for the weekly seesaw of “coffee is good for you, coffee is bad for you” news coverage with which we’ve all become too familiar….

BONUS: If you want to see some research that’s way outside the it-must-be-important-because-it’s-embargoed research, dip into the Annals of Improbable Research from time to time.

Also see: The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for Neuroscience: awarded to Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford [USA], for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.

The authors, at George Mason University, USA, and National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, explain:

“the relative length of the second to the fourth finger (2D:4D)… Though we do not yet understand the exact biological mechanisms… This paper uses a sample of working-age respondents from Moscow and the Moscow region to establish that [lower 2D:4D ratios] is clearly correlated with higher earnings for both women and men once controlling for factors such as age, education, and occupation.”

Here’s further detail from the study:

Next time you run into a professional economist, ask about this discovery. If you yourself are a professional economist, we would enjoy hearing how this discovery will change the way you understand the world economy.